A modern Battle of Brooklyn Heights for fans of borough history only.
A fifth sort-of case for Brooklyn historian Dr. Erica Donato shows her teaming up with an aging local activist against rapacious Jehovah’s Witnesses. Uh-huh.
Louisa McWilliams Gibbs isn’t called the duchess of Brooklyn Heights for nothing. In her time, she’s marched, she’s demonstrated, she’s organized, she’s importuned City Hall, she’s done everything humanly possible to help her beloved borough retain the best of its distinctive character in the face of wishy-washy government bureaucrats, bean-counting civil servants, and slick real estate speculators out to make a quick buck. Now that she’s too old for most of those activities—she has a hard time even getting up and down the stairs without the assistance of Sierra, her hipster aide—trouble has ironically come right to her doorstep in the person of Daniel Towns, a Watchtower bigwig intent on selling a parcel of properties the Witnesses own to mega-developer Mike Prinzig, of Prince Projects. Since Louisa’s home adjoins one of the Witnesses’ buildings, Towns wants to broker the sale of her home to Prince Projects too. When Louisa bridles and stiffens her spine, two activities she’s very good at, someone begins harassing her with a series of anonymous letters she reluctantly describes to Erica and a pair of NYPD officers. The report falls flat once Louisa and Erica realize that Towns has been getting anonymous letters too, and even flatter when Towns is found dead inside one of the well-kept underground tunnels connecting the buildings. In the experienced hands of Erica (Brooklyn Wars, 2017, etc.), however, the promising mystery runs down rather than winding up. And despite restoration expert Nancy Long’s tale of woe, there’s precious little in the way of disclosures about the Witnesses either. It’s hard not to sympathize with the cop who tells Erica, calling to report on the latest anticlimactic developments: “I have real crimes to handle here.”
A modern Battle of Brooklyn Heights for fans of borough history only.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-9934-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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